This 195-page book is a collection of assessment tasks for K-8 science curricula that also includes insights and reflections of teachers participating in the development of this material.

"The Assessment Sampler has been compiled to disseminate the [Assessment Project's] design and outcomes to a wider audience" (p. 1). The material is intended for K-8 school teachers, administrators, and staff developers.

This material presents results of the Assessment Project, a joint initiative of the Partnership for Systemic Change, the Educational Testing Service, and the Merck Institute, which together studied assessment strategies for inquiry-based instruction. As part of the project, teachers investigated assessment alternatives, designed and field-tested tasks, and met with colleagues and project staff to consider what assessment revealed about students' science understanding. Teachers met in groups to discuss their work on developing the assessments and to respond to several key questions bearing on their experience in the project.

An Assessment Sampler features 17 examples of the more than 100 assessment tasks compiled by the Assessment Project. The first two chapters provide the theoretical background for the development of the assessment materials. The Overview of the Assessment Project (Chapter 1) describes the design and guiding principles of the project, which involved over 125 teachers in the project area. The Analysis of Teacher's Reflections (Chapter 2) identifies and analyzes "the teachers' insights concerning assessment design and their reflections upon what was learned from the process of developing such tasks" (p. 1).

Chapter 3 (Assessment Tasks) includes samples of K-8 assessment tasks with a variety of non-traditional techniques to evaluate students' progress in science learning; these include performance tasks, writing and drawing prompts, journal entries, and oral interactions with teachers and peers. The student science activities featured in the book were either developed by the author teachers or selected from existing curricular materials such as Insights, FOSS, STC, or Delta. Each task contains a description of the assessment, the skills and knowledge (keyed to state and national education standards) that are evaluated, a description of the evaluation procedure, teachers' reflections on the assessment task, and examples of student work with teacher comments.

This material could be used for pre-service and in-service workshops for elementary teachers in combination with inquiry-based elementary science programs such as FOSS. The assessment tasks could serve as a blueprint for users who could adapt presented strategies to their own needs. The progress in student learning could be verified by suitable follow-up activities months or years after the new learning.

An Assessment Sampler presents new assessment techniques that can be challenging to teachers; therefore, professional development providers will want to plan for possible ranges in teachers' preparation and familiarity with these techniques.